Gore's Quest For Chads Might Have Tripled Bush's Victory Margin. Bush Demanded "Overvotes," Which Could Have Cost Him The Election.

And the study found that Gore's loss can be pinned on his team's failure to force recounts in counties using optically scanned paper ballots. Despite all the focus on punch cards and their failings, Gore's only chance of winning lay in counting the optically scanned ballots -- most of them in counties carried by Bush -- that were virtually ignored by both sides in the long post-election fight.

NO SIMPLE ANSWERS

More than anything, the study gives the clearest picture yet of what was actually in the piles of uncounted ballots that were at the center of the legal and political fight that raged for 36 days after the election.

For the first time, it's possible to say what might have happened if the candidates, the canvassing boards and the courts had done things differently.

One of the most compelling questions since the election has been: Who would have won if all the uncounted ballots were hand-counted using the same standards?

If that had happened using the counting methods most widely used in the state, the study shows, Bush would have gotten an extra 3,607 votes, Gore an extra 4,204 -- giving Gore the state by a scant 60-vote margin.

But such a recount -- with every county using the same standard for counting ballots -- was never close to happening.

Instead, any examination of how Florida's uncounted ballots might have changed the outcome of the election must take into account the hodgepodge of different standards and competing agendas played out in courtrooms, press conferences and elections offices across the state. One of the pivotal moments in the recount fight came Dec. 8, when a 4-3 majority of the Florida Supreme Court, all appointed by Democratic governors, ordered the recounting of tens of thousands of "undervotes." Gore's backers celebrated.

Their hopes died 24 hours later when a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, all five appointed by Republican presidents, shut down those recounts, effectively giving the election to Bush.

But even if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened, the limited recount of undervotes that the Florida court ordered probably would not have put Gore in the White House, the ballot study shows.

If the recount had been conducted requiring at least one corner of a chad to be broken for it to count as a vote, Gore would have trimmed only about 100 votes from Bush's winning 537-vote margin, the study showed.

And if all the state's undervotes were recounted using a standard requiring only a dimple on the ballot -- a standard advocated by Gore's attorneys and vehemently opposed by Bush's -- Bush's lead could have increased to more than 1,700 votes, the study showed.

In any case, neither of those scenarios reflects what was truly taking place in Florida's 67 counties during the recount.

RECOUNT CHAOS, CONFUSION

Without any detailed instructions from the Florida court for carrying out the recount, counties would have used a variety of standards, just as they had election night and in a subsequent mandatory recount. Some even would have counted different ballots.

In an attempt to mimic the standards each county would have used and which ballots they would have recounted, the Orlando Sentinel and the three other Florida newspapers in the project last spring interviewed nearly 200 county election officials and the Tallahassee judge who would have administered the recount.

The findings reflected the confusion that prevailed after the Florida court's recount order.

Officials in nine counties planned to count not just undervotes but also overvotes, ballots on which machines detected more than one vote. Four others would have refused to do any recounts at all.

The study found that, even if the recount had been allowed to proceed, and the ballots had been recounted just as election officials in each county say they planned, Bush still could have won by a 493-vote margin.

But if the recount had gone forward, it might have been expanded beyond what the Florida Supreme Court ordered by the man responsible for overseeing it, Leon County Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis.

The recount was halted before he decided how it would finally work, but Lewis said in an interview earlier this year that he would not have ignored the overvote ballots. Though he stopped short of saying he definitely would have expanded the recount to include overvotes, Lewis emphasized, "I'd be open to that."

If that had happened, it would have amounted to a statewide hand recount. And it could have given the election to Gore.

Ironically, it was Bush's lawyers who wanted overvotes included in any statewide recount. Gore's side didn't object but wanted undervotes examined first, because time was so short. Neither side realized how many votes would emerge from overvoted ballots.